Soo Jin didn’t wield it completely, as it turned out. From time to time, she uses 200ml paper cups as a measuring device to get her into the court and then fine-tune it from there by tasting.
As her kimchi cabbage drips into the sink, she slices it with Dried Kelp soup, Dried Kelp broth, ginger, garlic, apple and Korean radish, which is reinforced by dried shrimp and dried pollack heads.
At this point, she put on a pair of gloves, a step that no one later touched their hands with other sensitive body parts and should be skipped. She grabbed gochugaru, poured it into a bowl of Korean radish, cut it into matchsticks, and added 150 ml – plus fish sauce, followed by a tablespoon of saujeot (salt and salt), which was actually a small bite. Next, she threw over 30 quarters of the scallion and stirred it all vigorously, then split the mixture into three bowls of heads of each cabbage.
Each cabbage leaf caught the attention of people, the soft, leafy ends of each quarter were folded up, and the whole thing hovered inside the outermost leaves. Soo Jin hasn’t spoken directly to me all over the place since my sister translation, but here she turned to me and stored a spicy, fragmented cabbage leaf, rolled into a bite dumpling, went straight into my mouth with her still-wearing hands, and made one with her own. Our noses ran and our eyes widened. It’s original, but it’s fine. I’m glad to have this flavor, before salt, microorganisms, and time to start doing their thing seriously.
There, when my scalp beads of salty sweat, my answer is: whatever taste. Neither what their family taught them, what they picked up on TV, nor my Korean guide was blind. The flavor they create during the kimchi making process is strong, sometimes very strong, but by tasting them they can confirm where they are on the map and know whether they are heading in the right direction or need the right direction. If it is particularly salty in the early step, they may back down a little later and know that the taste will be gentle and change as the kimchi ferments.
Back at home in Seattle, I used recipes from trusted sources to batch Eric Kim and Deuki Hong. I’m not at the moment when I can rotate it – it actually starts with it – but when I went and was learning those benchmark flavors, I could imagine getting there one day.
